The Secret Adventurer's Club Second Adventure (part 8)

Finny and co. followed the road south west for a few dozen metres. With a last look back at the garage to see if they were being watched, the party crossed the road and set off due south.

By now Finny’s arms and shoulders were really starting to ache. Swopping the heavy pistol from hand to hand wasn’t working anymore so she tried sticking it into the waistband of her britches. It was while she was trying to find a comfortable way of doing this that the questions started. Onetooth started it.

“Was ya gonna shoot him Finn?”

“No! Of course not.”

Worms joined in, fast-drawing a two fingered gun.

“I’d have shot him in the head. PEW! Were ya gonna aim for the head?”

“I wasn’t going to…”

Onetooth took up the theme.

“I heard you should always shoot the body, not the head coz you might miss. Shoot him in the body next time Finn.”

Finny brought the party to a halt. She stared at them, already seeing that, as far as Onetooth and Worms were concerned anyway, what had happened at the garage was already becoming a shoot-out.

“Look. I din’t shoot him an’ I was never gonna shoot him. He saw the gun by an accident… Okay?”

Behind their eyes, the two youngest adventurers tried to fit Finny’s explanation into their own preferred narrative. It took a second or two.

“Yeah but… You would still have shot him in the body right?

She checked her watch. It was already half way past the ten and they were nowhere near where she wanted to be. The irritation showed in her voice.

“C’mon, let’s just keep going.”

The plodded on. The boy’s now, bored from whacking at the grass with their sticks just let them drag behind. The uneven ground, the log grass and the constant lookout for coyotes was making the going tiring. When walking was made even worse by becoming constant low climb the moaning began. It was too hot. My legs hurt. I’m hungry. And finally, Are we there yet?

“Just Shurrup okay. We’ll stop an’ have a drink when we get to the top of the hill.” Finny was having her own problems. It was too hot and her legs ached and she was hungry. On top of that, the barrel of the pistol was digging into her with every step and she still had to hold it to stop it from twisting out of her pants and landing on the ground, or worse, her toes.

The grumbling, however, stopped. Finny was their leader. She might be a girl but she was awful fierce when she got angry. If their thought about it, that was probably one of the reasons that she was the leader.

After ten minutes of hiking in silence they finally reached the top of the long incline and Finny let them stop. Everyone flopped and Casper handed out the water. The morning sun was rising higher in the cloudless sky and everyone was dehydrated. When they had all drank their fill Casper decanted what remained into one bottle, and even that wasn’t full. He quietly informed Finny.

Finny nodded, she had noticed too, but her attention was fixed on some buildings in the distance. Not Hope Springs, of that she was sure because she thought she recognised the tall tower thingy that seemed to be made of pipes and rose twice the height of the buildings around it. Long ago, on that night, she had seen that tower or something very like it silhouetted against the bright, moonlit sky.

Now, though, and more importantly considering their circumstances, the buildings might have water. Probably not the clean, pre-boiled water they had gotten from Edna but hopefully clean enough to refill their bottles.

Random chatter returned to the group, signifying that for now at least their spirits had returned. Finny made sure to smile a lot, to ‘show confidence even though you’re shitting yourself’ as Joe had put it. She called time and everyone set off down the hill.

Finny’s spirits, however, hadn’t lifted all that much. She was starting to suspect that, maybe, she was getting out of her depth and, worse of all, that she wasn’t going to be able to protect them… even with a gun.